Samuel R. Delany
Samuel R. Delany was born on April 1, 1942, in New York City, a city whose cultural and intellectual density formed the backdrop for his early development. A citizen of the United States writing in English, Delany received his early education at the Dalton School, the Horace Mann School, and the Bronx High School of Science before attending the City College of New York. This sequence of institutions, all rooted in the same urban environment, preceded his emergence as a novelist, essayist, literary critic, and literary scholar.
Delany built his career as a science fiction writer, producing work associated with both science fiction and feminist science fiction. Among the novels for which he is notable are Babel-17, Nova, Dhalgren, and Hogg. These four titles represent a portion of his output as a novelist and author working in the English language within the American literary tradition.
His work has been recognized with several awards across his career. He received the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the Hugo Award for Best Short Story, both significant honors within the science fiction field. He also received the Stonewall Book Award. Beyond these, he was granted the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award, a career recognition conferred in the science fiction and fantasy field.
In addition to his fiction, Delany has worked as a literary critic and essayist, roles that place him alongside his identity as a novelist and literary scholar. His career has been rooted in the New York City origins where it began, and his body of work spans the genres of science fiction and feminist science fiction. The Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award stands as one of the formal acknowledgments of his contributions across these areas.
Quotes by Samuel R. Delany
Samuel R. Delany's insights on:
The reason for privacy is not so that people will not know you go to the bathroom. It's to allow certain things to go on that you don't want other people to know about, when all is said and done. But the things I don't want other people to know about are not my sex life.
I grew up in Harlem, a block away from what was then the most crowded block in New York City, according to the 1950 census. Something like ten thousand people lived in one city block.
'Dhalgren' is the kind of book in which you can look for pretty much anything you want. I tried to put as much into it as I could at the time.
However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory -not on the order of actual occurrence.
Linguistics is very much a science. It's a human science, one of the human sciences. And it's one of the more interesting human sciences.
I shall always be able to come up with new fantasies. As long as there are people walking around in the street, as long as I have books to read and windows to look out of, I'm not going to use them up.
I think a 23-page ordinary comic is an investment for the artist, but if you're doing something 60 to 104 pages, that's a really big investment for an artist. So unless you've got someone who wants to pay you while you're doing it or up front, it's kind hard to get someone to do that with you, unless you're the artist yourself.
I want to read about a character doing something fairly quiet where I can picture who the character is, and what their attitude towards the world is - which I'm a lot more interested in than what they do under the pressure of a gunfight.
My family trained me to be polite to people I had just met, and that included strangers. You speak when you're spoken to. You look people in the eye when they address you and when you address them back.
It looks like the writer is telling you a story. What the writer is actually doing, however, is using words to evoke a series of micromemories from your own experience that inmix, join, and connect in your mind in an order the writer controls, so that, in effect, you have a sustained memory of something that never happened to you.